After years of anger, relief, frustration and torment caused to fans, and just as many years of back and forth discussion with FIFA, the Football Association has agreed to trial Hawk Eye goal-line technology in an upcoming football game.

Having been a fundamental and vital part of sports such as tennis and cricket for some years now, many angered and amazed football fans have spent decades watching FIFA blow off requests for the technology to find its place in the beautiful game, but weeks of talks between the association and Haw

k Eye – the technology’s originators – has finally seen it brought to the table – or rather the field.

The technology has actually already been trialled once before in the Hampshire Senior Cup final earlier this month, though there were considerably less critical eyes paying attention than there will be at the expected 85,000 capacity Wembley sell out of England v. Belgium on June 2nd.

How it works

The technology will work through six cameras installed at each goal line feeding video footage through to a small collection of testers who will be analysing the results. Even the game’s officials will be kept ‘out of the loop’ in the process, meaning that if there were a disputed incident in the trial games the technology would have no influence over the final decision.

The Hawk Eye system runs in competition against GoalRef; a system that utilises low magnetic fields which, when passed through fully by a ball, detects the change and instantly sends the report to the game’s officials through encrypted radio signals. Due to the nature of the procedure, a small chip is required to be embedded within the football.

GoalRef is set to be tested on the same day in the Denmark v. Australia friendly, and the Football Association Board say that a successful result with either technology could lead to the approval of goal-line technology in a meeting at the beginning of July.

Of course, this approval may depend largely on whether there are any such disputes in the trialling games in the run up to the meeting, and so for possibly the first time in history we may be part of a whole host of football fans desperately praying for an incident of this nature.

We could also be tempted to ask what the decision would be if such an upset were to occur in the trials of one system but not the other – surely the Board could not approve one system over another purely on the basis that they have seen it in action? Whatever the answers, these are set to be some of the most excited friendlies in quite a while.